Bookatlas
1911–1969Latin America
Portrait of José María Arguedas

José María Arguedas

Peru

Lyrical and incantatory, Quechua rhythms and vocabulary pressed directly into Spanish prose: nature and myth given the same weight as ordinary event.

Arguedas's mother died when he was two, and a hostile stepmother banished him to the servants' quarters, where Quechua-speaking women raised him on a language and worldview that white Peruvian society disdained; the double consciousness that resulted became his lifelong subject as both novelist and pioneering ethnologist of Andean culture.

Deep Rivers (1958) drew directly on his own boarding-school years, following a boy shuttled between his father's itinerant life and a religious school in Abancay, torn between the animist, communal world of Quechua Indigenous life and the racial hierarchies Spanish-speaking Peru enforced around it.

He worked for decades as a folklorist and university professor of ethnology, translating Quechua oral literature into Spanish, before severe depression led him to take his own life at the University of San Marcos in Lima in 1969.

Their books in the atlas

  1. 1941
    Cover of Yawar Fiesta
    Yawar Fiesta
    Lvl 6colonial & postcolonial
  2. 1958
    Cover of Deep Rivers
    Deep Rivers
    Lvl 6bildungsroman

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